The AWP Award Series in the Novel

Winner: Mandy Keifetz

Flea Circus: A Brief Bestiary of Grief, New Issues Press

Francine Prose, Judge: I was drawn to the sheer strangeness of the writer's project: the lyrical, tough-talking high-low lament of a Jersey Girl who cannot, who will not, and who essentially luxuriates in her refusal to get over the suicide of her lover. A simultaneously reckless and calculated intensity permeates this novel, in which the most important event has already happened, and the narrative arc (if we can call it that) is mostly ruminative and interior. Fairly soon, we realize that the narrator is playing with language, with the alphabet, even; it's not accidental that the epigraph is taken from Georges Bataille. But for me the real surprises were less about letters than about voice, about sentences and about the paragraphs that nearly always ended in a different place (and more interestingly) than I might have predicted.

Kirkus Starred Review 11/15/2011

“Tim Acree, Brooklyn barkeep's boy, merchant sailor, entomologist, aka Professor Aloysius, flea-circus ringmaster, lies dead, a suicide, at the bottom of a tenement air shaft. And Isabelle Oystershifl mourns.

Keifetz's (Corrido, 1998) second novel, the winner of the 2010 AWP Award, simply dazzles. Izzy, a math geek, always reliant on "the sweet bounds of cold, clean, reason," now realizes that "my great belief has been in my love for Timmy." Izzy works for a large bank, but she isn't defined by her cubicle. Her connection with Tim shaped her world, soothed her psyche and soul. Now Tim's unexplained suicide, a leap into the abyss without word or note of despair, has unhinged Izzy. The novel is 23 chapters, titled with word-names beginning with letters from "A" to "W." The first is Altamont, the name of the couple's cat, and within it Keifetz delves into the human body falling "at 32-feet-per-second per second," the tenement where the two met and lived, the cat hoarder from whom they pilfered Altamont and a brief biographical sketch of Tim. And so it goes until Izzy arrives at "W," for the Wall, a concrete buttress near her childhood home. All that Izzy believes, all that surrounds her, all that she conjures up in her misery becomes a metaphor for Tim, for their love, for her life without him. Attempting to cope, Izzy plays classic logic games, contemplates William Blake, regards the evolution of megafauna. Sharing her world is Mark, Tim's bar-owner brother, who attempts to draw Izzy from despair, and Dr. Edward "Pudge" Goroguchi, another entomologist, inventor of the flea-breeding artificial dog, and owner of an Izzy-coveted dream car, a 1971 Plymouth Road Runner. Goroguchi becomes Izzy's lover, each of them fulfilling an oblique longing beyond love, despair and sex. The novel takes the reader to the dark place where reason and love collide and collapse under the oppressive weight of loss.

A tour de force.”

Library Journal

( November 15, 2011; 9781936970049 )

Tim Acree was a fascination -- with an endearing turn of phrase and irrepressible smile and as the proud Professor of Fleas. Why, then, did he throw his life away-jumping into the airshaft between the cluttered tangle of apartments he called home? That is what is driving Izzy, the girlfriend he left behind, slowly mad. There has to be an answer somewhere amid the tangle of memories and fleas, and she is scrabbling after it with everything she has. This winner of the AWP Award Series in the Novel is an entrancing, alphabetical look at how suicide affects the survivors, and it works to make sense of all of the whys and hows that those left behind inevitably fumble through in the wake of sudden death. Izzy's enthralling voice pulls the reader through each heartbreak and revelation. VERDICT The experience of Keifetz's second novel (after Corrido) is less like reading a book than having a frighteningly intimate conversation over coffee. A must for fans of literary fiction.”

Winner of the AWP Award, Keifetz’s second novel, after Corrido (1998), is a spellbinding story of bereavement. In the wake of her entomologist lover’s suicidal fall down a tenement airshaft, Isabelle “Izzy” Oystershifl, a banker and mathematician from New Jersey, slogs through her grief, realizing just how deeply he affected her soul. Izzy occasionally tends bar in the Irish joint owned by Tim’s brother, Mark, and ponders everything from her faith in reason to the possibility that she might be pregnant. She also looks after the flea circus Tim left behind. In 23 chapters, titled after words beginning with the letters A through W, the novel seamlessly weaves between Izzy’s memories of the past, from which she pieces together an obsessive portrait of Tim, and the present, where she turns to another flea-obsessed entomologist, Pudge Goroguchi, as a fill-in lover, and creates mathematical formulas based on Tim’s fall. Although Izzy’s anguish might prove stagy or irritating in a lesser writer’s hands, Keifetz creates a narrator whose whip-smart narration—sex-drenched, hilarious, and full of wordplay—is anything but a downer. — Jonathan Fullmer